Many game developers struggles with the continuous pull towards creating new more exciting projects, instead of finishing the one they are already working on. This is known as the “Shiny Object Syndrome” (Source) and it’s very common among game developers, and I have found that I’m no exception! I tend to love starting new projects, and have a hard time pulling a project through to the end, and finishing it.. I’m kind of aware of this problem, but it’s really hard to resist! But this time it’s different I keep telling myself! This time I’ve actually returned to a game I’ve worked on before.. Voila, battlemaze or codename bttlmz returns! A game I started working on after I released my last finished game.. This time maybe I’ll be able to finish it? Only time will tell..
Category Archives: Games
Working on the arenas
I find 3D modelling in blender very fun, but it sure is time consuming. And it get even more time consuming when I all the time need to render out my scenes even though I only need the models for Unity.
Heres my latest render of Shackles Bay, Chuck’s home and arena. It’s in no way final, alot of it needs to change before it’s done, but it has about the right feel already.
What do you think?
Animating more characters
I’ve put alot of work into the characters of Wacky waves lately just to get a feel of the style of the game and to try to get some inspiration for the continued work on the game. These characters is what will make the game feel alive, so I believe they are very important to get right. But they are also very fun to do. Check out this GIF! What do you think?
Animating characters
The two last days I’ve been creating one of the characters for the Wacky Waves game,”Chuck Shackles” the ghost pirate. I’m creating the characters in Blender3D. My skills are limited, but I’m taking my time with the models, keeping the poly count low, and keeping everything flat shaded and polygons single colored! Here is an early render of the character:
I also tried out Adobe’s mixamo autorigger and animations to take him for a spin!
Any thoughts on the style I’m going for?
Wacky Waves
I’ve started focusing all my development energy on a game project named “Wacky Waves”. It’s going to be a fast paced action boating game with battles between players and the environment. I’ve put up a site www.wackywaves.com that will have some info on the game, and a twitter account @wackywavesgame that I’m sharing my progress on! I’ll be sharing my bigger progress posts on this blog mainly, to keep things in one place! Hopefully I’ll be able to share more regularly than I’ve been able to before! Here’s some very early screens from the game I’m working on!
Polywater now with wirefoam
I’m testing out new ideas for how I can achive foaming in my polywater shader without the use of textures, and I got this idea that maybe wireframing the shoreline would give a nice effect. At the moment I’m not sure about what I think.. a bit too styliced perhaps..
Latest development
I’ve been working on my terrain/ environment generator alot since my last post! Mostly finetuning the tree-generation and placement and I’ve added grass-patches which waves in the wind! In this latest update I’ve also started adding gameplay elements like enemies! Not much yet, but we are getting somewhere!
Progress on my terraingenerator
Terrain generation
It’s been a while since my last update, but I’ve been working on terrain generation for some time now. I’ve built my own Marching tetrahedron implementation. Which has not been the simplest of tasks. But I’ve got it working OK for now. I’m going to keep working on it.., it still needs some tweaking. But I thought I wanted to share. Have a look!
I’ve also worked a little more on my poly water and movement along the waves, which isn’t perfect, but OK at the moment.
Low poly water shader
Edit 2: Check out my newest version: Unipolywater shader
Edit: I’ve added a link to a downloadable version of the shader! Copying the code from this post does crazy stuff to the symbols..
The side tracking specialist strikes again.
I’ve been working on another project lately and ended up in need of low poly flat shaded animated water.
I tried editing the mesh at runtime by script. Using the method mentioned by joni.giuro here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/low-poly-water-help.276685/
But when using the standard plane with this script, basically 200 triangles and when you’ve separeted all vertices (600), FPS drops down from 1500 without script to 190 with script applied. If you add more planes or models with more triangles you quickly get to a point where you get 1 FPS. So I needed something else.
That’s when I figured I’d try my luck with shaders.
Tried googling for solutions, but nothing was to be found so I needed to build my own. With no experience in shader programming this proved to be harder than I expected. But fast forward through some horrible looking results to today. Now I’ve gotten to a point where I can take any plane (not having to worry about splitting verts) applying my shader and getting this:
Almost no hit on FPS with fully animated low poly flat shaded water with specular color. And with this solution: 
I can add looots of planes with this shader with almost no hit on FPS. Here I’ve added got 30 standard Unity planes with 200 tris each, all animating off into the distance.
Here’s a video of it in motion:
So how is this done, you say?
Code below.
It’s not perfect but it works! F.ex. I’ve left the UV coords in there but don’t need them for this. And I’m not entirely happy with the waves just yet.. But here you go.
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Shader "Trolltunga/LowPolyWaves 2.0"
{
Properties
{
_Color("Color", Color) = (1,0,0,1)
_SpecColor("Specular Material Color", Color) = (1,1,1,1)
_Shininess("Shininess", Float) = 1.0
_WaveLength("Wave length", Float) = 0.5
_WaveHeight("Wave height", Float) = 0.5
_WaveSpeed("Wave speed", Float) = 1.0
_RandomHeight("Random height", Float) = 0.5
_RandomSpeed("Random Speed", Float) = 0.5
}
SubShader
{
Tags { "Queue"="Transparent" "IgnoreProjector"="True" "RenderType"="Transparent" }
Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha
Pass
{
CGPROGRAM
#include "UnityCG.cginc"
#pragma vertex vert
#pragma geometry geom
#pragma fragment frag
float rand(float3 co)
{
return frac(sin(dot(co.xyz ,float3(12.9898,78.233,45.5432))) * 43758.5453);
}
float rand2(float3 co)
{
return frac(sin(dot(co.xyz ,float3(19.9128,75.2,34.5122))) * 12765.5213);
}
float _WaveLength;
float _WaveHeight;
float _WaveSpeed;
float _RandomHeight;
float _RandomSpeed;
uniform float4 _LightColor0;
uniform float4 _Color;
uniform float4 _SpecColor;
uniform float _Shininess;
struct v2g
{
float4 pos : SV_POSITION;
float3 norm : NORMAL;
float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
};
struct g2f
{
float4 pos : SV_POSITION;
float3 norm : NORMAL;
float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
float3 diffuseColor : TEXCOORD1;
float3 specularColor : TEXCOORD2;
};
v2g vert(appdata_full v)
{
float3 v0 = mul(_Object2World, v.vertex).xyz;
float phase0 = (_WaveHeight)* sin((_Time[1] * _WaveSpeed) + (v0.x * _WaveLength) + (v0.z * _WaveLength) + rand2(v0.xzz));
float phase0_1 = (_RandomHeight)*sin(cos(rand(v0.xzz) * _RandomHeight * cos(_Time[1] * _RandomSpeed * sin(rand(v0.xxz)))));
v0.y += phase0 + phase0_1;
v.vertex.xyz = mul((float3x3)_World2Object, v0);
v2g OUT;
OUT.pos = v.vertex;
OUT.norm = v.normal;
OUT.uv = v.texcoord;
return OUT;
}
[maxvertexcount(3)]
void geom(triangle v2g IN[3], inout TriangleStream triStream)
{
float3 v0 = IN[0].pos.xyz;
float3 v1 = IN[1].pos.xyz;
float3 v2 = IN[2].pos.xyz;
float3 centerPos = (v0 + v1 + v2) / 3.0;
float3 vn = normalize(cross(v1 - v0, v2 - v0));
float4x4 modelMatrix = _Object2World;
float4x4 modelMatrixInverse = _World2Object;
float3 normalDirection = normalize(
mul(float4(vn, 0.0), modelMatrixInverse).xyz);
float3 viewDirection = normalize(_WorldSpaceCameraPos
- mul(modelMatrix, float4(centerPos, 0.0)).xyz);
float3 lightDirection = normalize(_WorldSpaceLightPos0.xyz);
float attenuation = 1.0;
float3 ambientLighting =
UNITY_LIGHTMODEL_AMBIENT.rgb * _Color.rgb;
float3 diffuseReflection =
attenuation * _LightColor0.rgb * _Color.rgb
* max(0.0, dot(normalDirection, lightDirection));
float3 specularReflection;
if (dot(normalDirection, lightDirection) < 0.0)
// light source on the wrong side?
{
specularReflection = float3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0);
// no specular reflection
}
else // light source on the right side
{
specularReflection = attenuation * _LightColor0.rgb
* _SpecColor.rgb * pow(max(0.0, dot(
reflect(-lightDirection, normalDirection),
viewDirection)), _Shininess);
}
g2f OUT;
OUT.pos = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, IN[0].pos);
OUT.norm = vn;
OUT.uv = IN[0].uv;
OUT.diffuseColor = ambientLighting + diffuseReflection;
OUT.specularColor = specularReflection;
triStream.Append(OUT);
OUT.pos = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, IN[1].pos);
OUT.norm = vn;
OUT.uv = IN[1].uv;
OUT.diffuseColor = ambientLighting + diffuseReflection;
OUT.specularColor = specularReflection;
triStream.Append(OUT);
OUT.pos = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, IN[2].pos);
OUT.norm = vn;
OUT.uv = IN[2].uv;
OUT.diffuseColor = ambientLighting + diffuseReflection;
OUT.specularColor = specularReflection;
triStream.Append(OUT);
}
half4 frag(g2f IN) : COLOR
{
return float4(IN.specularColor +
IN.diffuseColor, 1.0);
}
ENDCG
}
}
}
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